Archive for November, 2008

littleS3 basic usage

Friday, November 28th, 2008

I have updated the littleS3Getting Started” wiki page, adding a “Basic Usage” section. This section includes:

Some littleS3 documentation!

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

So, I promised some documentation “soon” for littleS3. That was 2 months ago. Well, I have finally made good. I have just published a “Getting Started” wiki page to the project site. So far, this document provides some background on the project components, how to deploy it to an application server, and what the configuration files “configure” (along with sample configuration files in the project download section).

I would still like to add some samples of how to use the system to create buckets, add objects, etc. This is very similar to the usage described in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide for the REST API, but there is a bit of a trick since you are using your own application server. In addition to the host name, you may need to include a context path (a servlet notion) to the REST URIs.

Google can sort

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

Google recently announced that they were able to sort 1 terabyte (TB) in 68 seconds using 1,000 computers. The previous record holder was 209 seconds on 910 computers. I was impressed by this because I recently read about MapReduce and have been studying some of Google’s papers about the Google File System. Google used both MapReduce and the Google File System to attain this sorting record. But, being Google, they thought that since they did 1 TB so successfully, why not try sorting 1 petabyte (PB). (A petabyte is a thousand terabytes.) Google was able to sort 1 PB in six hours and two minutes and used 4,000 computers.

Why does Google care about sorting? One reason may be that their primary revenue source is based on advertising. And they have vast access to massive amounts of data submitted by their end users in the form of search queries. The more efficient Google is at crunching this information, the better they can target their advertising to users, resulting in more revenue. And Google can use their data for other purposes too, like predicting flu outbreaks.

I have been very impressed by what I have been reading about MapReduce and the Google File system. These sorting results help prove how efficient their infrastructure is. I particulary like how they use commodity computers to achieve these results. I know that using multiple nodes can get tricky very quickly. But their techniques seem to be designed from the ground up to use multiple nodes. And with this mindset, they can more adequately manage and utilize their collective computing resources.

lightningtimer.net

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

I found Simon Willison’s lightningtimer.net Javascript timer to be totally awesome. The app is written in Javascript, all on one page. It lets you specify a time, and then a big-font timer counts down. The timer takes up the whole page. It can give you a warning, the background turns pink, when the timer is almost up. When the timer reaches zero, the background turns red and 0:00 blinks. Take a look at the page source for documentation on how to use lightningtimer.net. He says that he needed something for a Lightning Talk and this is the result.

Looking at the code (like I said, the Javascript is all in the page source, so just “view source” in your browser), it is a really cool example of Javascript. I was amazed how simple and elegant Simon’s code was. As someone who definitely is a poor Javascript hack, it is nice to see some good Javascript. And, I can use it as a tea timer too! 🙂

Greasemonkey for Pearson Access

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

During the day, I professionally work on a web application called Pearson Access. Today we determined that we needed a user administration process for one of our Pearson Access customers that would require them to always select a certain user role when creating a new user. The system doesn’t auto-check the role, the user will need to be trained to check it.

But, being a geek, that got me thinking. What if Greasemonkey could be used with a Greasemonkey script in Firefox to automatically check a role when creating a new user account. So, I wrote such a script: autoselectrole.user.js.